DONE: Additional fields for the series page

@Stretch in 5776 wrote: I think it would be a good idea if our standard format for a series page included, along with 'Title', 'Overall', 'Keywords", and 'Notables' a space for the number of episodes. It would also be nice if not just the year, but the season of the series could be posted in the standard format.

@Devil Doll in 5777 wrote: Both would require Rebecca to change the database format for an anime entry, and thus is unlikely to be implemented any time soon.

@Devil Doll in 5778 wrote: We would be able to create categories such as "2012 summer" but they would be assigned to the "Keywords" group, not the "Release year" group. I made a test case for Jinrui wa Suitai Shimashita to show you how this would look like.

@Rebecca in 5779 wrote: Those kinds of changes are pretty easy. If you want to write up a little proposal in the Todo section, I'll implement it.

@Devil Doll in 5780 wrote: That would include Stretch to decide whether he wants the release year to become a field as well, instead of a category as it is now (and allows to be part of the cascading category filter mechanism).

So, release year can be displayed as a field in the "Edit Series" dialog, but continue to be stored as a category. The only downside I see of that is that it would stop us from having more then one release year. I'll take a look soon and see how many series that actually impacts.

Number of episodes is easy to add.

@Stretch By "season of series" did you mean the season of the year it was released in? Or which season of the series itself is? Eg, "Summer", "Winter" or like "S1", "S2", "S3".

Just looking around, it seems to me that we could formalize a few other conventions... to start with, we could automatically generate the little summaries we often see, like "(TV Show, 26 Episodes, 2006)". Similarly, I could add a field for the franchise page and include that after the synopsis. This would allow us to stop having to explicitly enter an include element there.

I think I discussed the idea of automatically creating franchises a long time ago but can't find the postings for it. My idea back than was to add a field "franchise name" to each anime and let the CAR software then collect all anime entries with that same franchise name to generate the franchise list from it, perhaps sorted by release year ascending. This would have had the advantage that the current anime entry (i. e. the one where the franchise is to be included into) could be highlighted within the franchise display which the mere include solution can't do.

But seeing how the franchises have evolved (including explanation texts about the franchise elements, structuring the franchise into separate groups, and a Wikipedia link that can't automatically be generated because the target in Wikipedia doesn't always have the same name as the franchise), it would be difficult to automatically generate the current situation. It would be possible to automatically generate the "include" directive but this wouldn't change much. (It would probably result in more anime entries getting franchises with less than four anime though, as the franchise name field would likely be set by default during the anime entry creation.)

Multiple release years could be implemented by providing a start year and an ending year, the latter being empty by default and only needing to be set if different from the start year. The display on the anime page would be e. g. "2003" if the ending year is empty and "2003-2004" if the ending year is set.

The resulting list of years for a long lasting series (i. e. "2003-2006" = "2003", "2004", "2005", "2006") for the category list could be done internally to remain compatible with the current situation.

For the seasons I could live with both the season name or the season number; in any case it would be good to document their meanings both during the contribution dialog and on the display page (via a tooltip). the Contribution GUI should use a drop-down list with five entries (unspecified, winter, spring, summer, autumn) to make wrong input impossible... wait, what about series that are longer than 13 episodes? Use double-seasons ("winter+spring"), or a generic "multi-season" entry?

@Devil Doll in 5789 wrote: Multiple release years could be implemented by providing a start year and an ending year, the latter being empty by default and only needing to be set if different from the start year. The display on the anime page would be e. g. "2003" if the ending year is empty and "2003-2004" if the ending year is set.

In which case I'm not seeing a lot of value in doing that over what we have now. I could change the series view to display the release year(s) separately from categories, but otherwise keep things the same... would that achieve the same goals?

Perhaps there's a second, unstated goal, which says that making new categories should be easier? Built into editing of a series perhaps?

@Devil Doll in 5789 wrote: For the seasons I could live with both the season name or the season number; in any case it would be good to document their meanings both during the contribution dialog and on the display page (via a tooltip). the Contribution GUI should use a drop-down list with five entries (unspecified, winter, spring, summer, autumn) to make wrong input impossible... wait, what about series that are longer than 13 episodes? Use double-seasons ("winter+spring"), or a generic "multi-season" entry?

Also, what about OVA series that don't follow television series? This is why I would favor season numbers.

I'm not sure what Stretch intends to get as improvement. I'm fine with the year as it is, I only wanted to make sure that Stretch is aware that year and season could be seen in combination (and probably should, as "autumn" alone is no usable information).

Creating new categories is easy enough already; what's impossible is to assign categories to category groups, or other "visualization classes" such as what you suggest the year to possibly become.

As for "season numbers", don't confuse "season" (as in "Zero no Tsukaima Season 2") with "season" (as in "summer 2012"). The "anime season" subject is so complex that a data structure other than a full dependency graph (see aniDB for an example) can't possibly handle it, and I don't think Stretch was even referring to it; we're currently using the franchises to handle this.

Sorry I have been away for so long after making a suggestion. My computer monitor (I hope) broke down yesterday and I'm using my father's computer now. Regarding the number of episodes, I think that having a formal 'space' in a standard location on a series page for it would make it easier to find (rather than just hoping that whoever composed the synopsis felt like adding that bit of info) and would encourage contributors to include it. I'm not an expert in computer programming, but it seems to me that this would be a relatively simple change to make, and shouldn't interfere with the other information about a show which we already have. As for the season, it just seemed to me that so many shows come out in the space of one year nowadays that it would be handy if they could be broken down into seasons as well. But if it overcomplicates things exponentially, then maybe it isn't worth the trouble. What I meant was 'fall', 'spring', etc, not S1, S2, etc.

For the season-of-year GUI I would like to have a drop-down menu with five entries ("winter", "spring", "summer", "autumn", and "unspecified" as default value), plus some tool-tip explaining that "winter" means "January to March" etc.; as alternative this explanation text could be part of the drop-down entry already. The latter might be more user-friendly (as you can't overlook this information), the former might leave the GUI more "tidy" with the shorter text strings.